Politics: For an Irish person contemplating emigration, to Canada or Argentina, at the turn of the last century, the choice was simple, writes Ruairi Quinn.
The Latin American country was richer and had a better climate with greater future prospects than the chilly northern alternative. But years of political populism and corrupt politicians brought that richly endowed country to its knees, while Canada is a model of prosperity and social cohesion. The reason for this striking difference is politics and politicians.
Reading Frank Dunlop's book, I do not think he would have enjoyed Canada.
He certainly enjoyed the job he got as press officer to Fianna Fáil in opposition in 1973, after 16 years in government. He was head-hunted for the job, though he coyly refuses to reveal the identity of the person who ensured his passage from the Belfast office of RTÉ to Leinster House. Once installed in Fianna Fáil, he wisely opted to work from Leinster House, where his political masters were, and not Mount Street. Seamus Brennan, the general secretary, and Esmonde Smyth, the new head of research, were the other two young professionals brought in by Jack Lynch to revitalise the party. Stripped of the elaborate scaffolding of ministerial office and civil service support, Dunlop does not pull punches in his description of senior politicians.
While the book's cover has a good illustration of three Taoisaigh, Garret FitzGerald hardly features in comparison to the Lynch/Haughey saga. This book contains a fascinating set of stories, by a player, on the comeback of Jack Lynch and his inevitable political demise, followed by the feared arrival of Charles Haughey.
I am sure Frank Dunlop attended the funeral of Jack Lynch in Cork. Had the thousands of mourners knew what Frank Dunlop would write about their hero, there would have been more than one burial that day! Lynch's laziness allowed the Mount Street backroom boys to plan the election campaign without any input from the TDs. The manifesto was put together by Martin O'Donoghue in secret so that not even the late senator Eoin Ryan, who chaired the campaign committee, was aware of its populist cornucopia of goodies up to the night before publication. With the landslide victory delivered, Dunlop expected to be appointed government press secretary, but having consulted with media colleagues, he insisted on being appointed to the civil service, in the public interest, as an assistant secretary.
From this permanent and pensionable post, he was the mouthpiece of the Lynch-led government. His faith in this team is weakened by the lack of leadership coming from the taoiseach. The combination of personal arrogance from Colley and O'Malley, combined with the political ineptitude of Martin O'Donoghue, drove him into the bosom of the rising star from Kinsaley. He insists in using that old spelling because C.J. Haughey does. Prior to 1977, he drove Haughey, in his Daimler, around the country to address obscure cumann meetings. There is a revealing description of such a visit to Castlebar and the subsequent hospitality in the home of an enthusiastic activist, Padraig Flynn.
After the funeral of Lord Mountbatten in Westminster Abbey, a meeting took place in Downing Street between Margaret Thatcher and Jack Lynch. Dunlop's account is devastating. Lynch's disintegration in the US in the autumn of 1979, after the two Cork by-election defeats, convinced Dunlop that it was over. The amateurish approach of the Colley supporters would soon be rolled over by the relentless attention to detail by Haughey and his loyalists. After a 10-day visit to the US, Dunlop could not contain himself. Instead of going home to his wife and young child, within hours he was in Kinsaley, briefing Haughey on Lynch's intentions because, as he explains, "he could not resist the opportunity to intrigue".
Days later, in the ministerial corridors, he informed an incredulous O'Malley that O'Kennedy was voting for Haughey. The rise and fall of the Boss is told in a series of incidents and episodes which are not generally known and will add spice to people's memories.
The political turbulence of three general elections in 18 months is the background to his move to the Department of Education and his positive relationship with Fine Gael's John Boland.
His final political involvement, after he resigned from the civil service in 1986, was to help the disastrous 1992 election campaign of Albert Reynolds. He casually defends the use of non-existent tracking polls by Fianna Fáil as an acceptable subterfuge.
Throughout this account of a political life, Dunlop regales the reader with a set of opinions and justifications. He had to become a civil servant in order to have access to information, he claims. But the real reason, repeatedly stated, was job security. He frequently ignored the requirement of civil servants not to engage themselves in party politics. His explanation of demanding permanent and pensionable status is not true, as every ex-programme manager can testify.
His contempt for politicians permeates the entire book. Civil servants and the Department of Finance run the country, according to Dunlop, and elected politicians, with few exceptions, are merely time-serving ciphers happy to have their seat in a ministerial car.
Little ideology or political philosophy shines through, but when it does, it is illuminating. There are nationalists and anti-nationalists in the country and he is certainly not among the second. He refers to Fianna Fáil's visceral anti-Britishness in describing minister Paddy Power's outburst during the Falklands war.
For the many people who did not live through those events, the book has another dimension. Frank Dunlop is a disgraced public relations consultant and political lobbyist. For many years he used his skills and contacts to persuade politicians to make decisions in favour of his clients' interests. His persuasive fluency, supreme self-confidence and genial manner was effective. He probably did not need to give so much money to so many of them in order to have them do his bidding. But corrupt some he certainly did. He has claimed, in all the media exposure of the last week, that he did not invent the system but merely used it. No one else but him could have used it to such devastating effect. There is a clear attempt in the book to rehabilitate C.J. Haughey and, in the publicity of the launch, to rehabilitate Frank Dunlop. My response is "Don't cry for me Argentina".
Yes Taoiseach: Irish Politics From Behind Closed Doors By Frank Dunlop Penguin Ireland, 335 pp. £16.99
Ruairi Quinn is a Labour Party TD